‘Falling Man’ created around 9/11

“Falling Man”

by Don DeLillo (Scribner, 246 pages, $26)

It’s uncanny now to look back at the dust jacket for Don DeLillo’s novel “Underworld,” written four years before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.

The Twin Towers rise up into the mist, with a church silhouetted in the foreground. A bird, now looking unmistakably like an airplane, seems to target the tower on the right.

It’s not the only time DeLillo’s work has seemed to foreshadow Sept. 11. A character in “Mao II,” written in 1991, argues that terrorists have become more important than novelists in shaping the new world.

“The major work involves midair explosions and crumbled buildings,” DeLillo writes. “This is the new tragic narrative.”

It seems fitting then that DeLillo, a native New Yorker, should address the defining moment of American life six years after 9/11.

His new novel, “Falling Man,” his 14th, begins and ends with terror, midair explosions and crumbled buildings. There have been many other Sept. 11 novels, but no other American writer seems as equipped to tell the story.

In a brilliant opening passage, DeLillo captures in little more than three pages that precise moment after the towers fell: “The roar was still in the air, the buckling rumble of the fall.” Sirens sound, people running through the rubble with handkerchiefs over their mouths. “This was the world now.”

His main character, Keith Neudecker, works in the World Trade Center and escapes just before the collapse. We meet him walking through the streets of Manhattan, wearing a suit, carrying a briefcase, covered in ash with pieces of glass stuck in his hair and face.

This ghost of a man eventually shows up at his estranged wife’s home, and it’s through this one broken family – a husband, a wife and their only child – that DeLillo traces the wreckage of Sept. 11.

The jagged story accumulates through a series of mostly chronological vignettes in the days and weeks after the attacks. Back with his family, Keith seems estranged from himself, “like a humanoid robot,” trapped in a string of compulsive behaviors: competitive poker, wrist rehab exercises, an inexplicable affair with a woman who also survived the attacks.

There also is the famous DeLillo dialogue: oblique, stylized and funny, pointing more to the distances between people than to any conversational reality. It can be off-putting to some readers, but in this novel, at its best moments, it works to convey the strange distances, the broken spaces.

There are passages in “Falling Man” as good as anything you could hope to read about Sept. 11: the vivid chapters told from the perspective of the terrorists, a final section that perfectly describes the attacks themselves. It memorializes and re-creates the attacks in a way journalism and nonfiction can’t touch.

But the flaws of this slim novel are almost to be expected. The aftermath of 9/11 fits too neatly into the Big Ideas that DeLillo has about American society and culture. It’s a novel that sometimes reads more like a political essay.

Keith is the perfect DeLillo Man, alienated from his work, his family and himself, conditioned by the faceless mass culture.

“By the time the second plane appears,” he says, “we’re all a little older and wiser.”

And we wonder if this ghostly automaton is an accurate reflection of what we have become after Sept. 11. Aren’t we still hopeful and stupid and connected to each other? Didn’t we blink the soot out of our eyes and look up again?